Friday Cat Blogging - 31 July 2009

I iz confused. A couple of weeks ago I decided to take another crack at setting out limited portions of cat food in order to slim down my critters a bit. However, after a few days of this, a bit of googling persuaded me that I might have gone too far. I was underfeeding them, which is potentially dangerous, and in any case not what I had in mind.

So I decided to apply some Science™ to the problem. Step 1: go back to free feeding them, which has produced their present rotund condition, and see how much they hoover up. Answer: over the course of five days they ate 24 ounces of dry food and five cans of wet food. Converting from metric (because the boffins at Hill's list calories per kilogram on the side of their bag), that comes to 2,000 calories of dry food and 400 calories of wet food. That's 480 calories per day, or 240 calories per cat.

No problem, then. If I want to shrink them by 20% or so, just cut that down to about 200 calories.

But here's where I'm confused. As it happens, this matches up perfectly with the recommendation printed on the dry food bag, which suggests that a 15-pound cat needs about 200 calories per day. But if you google the subject of how much to feed your cat, virtually every source suggests 20-30 calories per pound. In other words 300-400 calories for a 15-pound cat.

This is ridiculous. These recommendations aren't even close. However, since both Science™ and the dry food instructions converge on approximately the same answer, I'm going with 200 calories for now. The internet appears — shockingly, I know — to be wildly misinformed.

Or something. Anyway, here are today's Before pictures. On the left, Domino and Inkblot are lying around in close proximity. Why? Because the carpet had just been cleaned and their sensitive little paws didn't like the slight dampness. So they decamped to the foyer. On the right, the carpet's all dry! Inkblot obviously approves.